SVN vs. Mercurial vs. Git For Managing Your Home Directory

http://joshcarter.com/productivity/svn_hg_git_for_home_directory

by chaostheory • 18 years ago

24 6 18 years ago

graywh2• 18 years ago

Linus Torvalds actually said Git was probably a bad idea for doing the home directory thing, but that hasn't stopped people from trying. I'd be interested to hear more first-hand stories from other hackers doing the same thing.

spydez• 18 years ago

One of the problems is Git cannot handle multi-gig files, so if your home includes some virtual machines that you want backed up/sync'd amongst computers, then Git can't be your whole solution.

Sketch• 18 years ago

I always see Mercurial vs Git, but no one ever talks about Monotone, considering it was a major influence on git. Its kind of disappoint b/c its a really great scm.

graywh2• 18 years ago

And it's not like nobody's using it. The Pidgin developers are using it.

Side note: http://www.monotone.ca lists Git/Cogito as an alternative, but not plain Git.

mde• 18 years ago

It would have been nice to also see the numbers for Bazaar, which seems to be #3 on the list of mainstream DVCSs. I adopted hg for $HOME a few months ago, and it's working great. This was after having used SVN for a few years for the same task. I might have chosen bzr for it's amazing attention to usability, but at the time it had some performance issues with 'log'. Although Git has quite a following, I just couldn't adopt it given its enourmous command set (140+ commands), and manual heuristics for when to repack.

maw• 18 years ago

Unfortunately, bzr is still pretty slow at log. It's also slow at branching a remote repo, and subsequent merges or pulls from that remote repo. On the bright side, it used to be unusably slow (for large projects, anyway) when doing things like status, diff, or commit, but these have all become considerably faster in recent releases, so there's hope that the still-slow commands will become fast in the future too.

I agree with you about usability. Nearly everything in bzr just works, which was why I ultimately decided against using hg (no dumb server support? ouch!) or git (where you need to understand its internals far too well in order to get anything done).

SVN vs. Mercurial vs. Git For Managing Your Home Directory

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